Monday, March 27, 2017

Just a quick note to let you know that I have a new article at The National, pondering what the effect might be if the Holyrood regional lists were replaced by a national list (as Alex Salmond has proposed). It will also doubtless irritate Morag by concluding that STV might be a better option from the SNP's point of view! I'm not really a convert to the cause of STV, but there's not much doubt it would offer a better chance of an SNP overall majority than AMS does. You can read the article HERE.

30 comments:

For it to be properly proportional you need to have constituencies with enough members to allow representatives of smaller parties get elected.

The 4 member but particularly 3 member wards for our council elections still lead to over-representation of dominant parties but if you look at the NI Assembly election the vote share and share of seats is pretty close across the board. (they used 5 member constituencies)

My personal opinion is that STV-WIGM (with 7 seats/ward) should be used for electing the primary Holyrood chamber & d'Hondt would be an ideal system for electing a revising chamber.

Talking about post-indy of course :)

d'Hondt is primarily designed such that no hegemony can develop and as such seems perfect for a second chamber.

STV-WIGM (given enough seats/ward) is more likely to produce an overall "winner" than d'Hondt while still reflecting the voters intentions, although it is quite likely a coalition govt may be required.

The problem with different systems for two chambers is trying to come up with an elegant method of voting for both at the same time. A lot of countries would welcome that, Eire being one.

We need to cut MSP'S by over a half. We have 59 MP'S at Westminster who are idle as most has been devolved to Scotland.This gravy train must and will end. The public services are being cut while we pay a fortune to unnesesary politicians.Forty first past the post and twenty list would be sufficient to run Scotland.

We have won the argument that is why yer erses are nippin. Call the referendum Nat sis. We have brexit, we are treating Knickerless with contempt like the frumpy numpty she is and she will still not call it. Jock bottle merchants. Up yer lederhosen.

Poor wee Nat si Jocks fae ra North. All yer crap about Brexit and selling Scotland out to the fash EU beaurocrats and you are still not ahead. Where are you going wrong? Could it be the Scots do not want to be sold out to Herman and the Frogs. The majority of Scots prefer their English neighbour! That must stick in yer craw ya fascists.

£350 million handed to Scotland from the English taxpayer and not a bit of gratitude from the greedy Scottish MP'S who are coining it in and laughing at the Scottish people.Cut the Scottish MSP'S by half and half the emissions.

the argument was not that SNP would win on constituency alone. The argument was that SNP wouldnt win any seats in 6 out of 8 regions on the list. And so it proved with over 750,000 votes on the list wasted. thankfully a few of us knew this would happen and voted green on list in places like fife, lothian, glasgow and west scotland to help preserve the pro-Yes majority.

I would normally delete an abusive comment like that, but the nonsense you're peddling is just too inviting not to respond to...

1) Yes, the argument was that the SNP would win on constituency seats alone. That argument was made many, many times.

2) I cannot think of a single person who made the specific claim that the SNP would fail to win list seats in "6 out of 8 regions".

3) Nobody "knew" that what would happen would happen. That's the whole reason all the talk of "tactical voting" was such guff - it could only work if you had premonitory powers that nobody actually possesses. Most of the specific predictions from the tactical voting lobby had the SNP on well over 65 constituency seats, so they were light-years wide of the mark.

4) Switching to the Greens did not "help preserve the Yes majority". There would have been a pro-independence majority either way.

5) Given that we would have a pro-independence majority either way and the only failure in the election was the squandering of the overall SNP majority, it's a tad baffling how anyone can claim with a straight face that "tactical" switching to the Greens made the situation better rather than worse. The ONLY way the SNP could have retained their majority would have been if more people had voted SNP. The fewer people that vote SNP on the list, the less likely it is that the SNP will win list seats. This ain't rocket science.

Point 4 is not really true... Only in highly unrealistic scenarios like all green votes on list voting SNP does it hold. In realistic scenarios like a 4.4% green list vote and the rest going to SNP results in net losses from green to labour. The 4.4% figure is chosen in line with historic green polling i.e. an estimate of the scale of the green tactical vote. Now you know this but refuse to admit it. Why aren't you big enough to do so?

The copier and paster above from 10:21pm is a serious person!However the Nat sis are doing all they can to avoid a referendum. The fash should declare UDI and we can settle the matter for decades. The Nat sis clearly are not democrats so violence must be their next option.

If Scotland wants to be a Nordic country, perhaps we should consider using an electoral system similar to one of the ones used there (they're similar, but not the same). The Danish system is basically a d'Hondt system with personal votes, so that d'Hondt is used to allocate seats to parties, and it's then the candidates with the most votes that get the seats.

Pro Union at 52% inspite of the mad frenzy by the Nat sis who claim to represent the Scots and more so after the brexit vote.So where are the Nat sis going wrong. Oh sorry I have the answer the fash do not speak for all of Scotland and the majority of Scots do not want to be run from Bruxelles und Frankfurt.Knickerless should resign along with the Paisley slapper. Time tae move on Nat sis you need fresh blood.

The troll calls Scottish people "jocks", advocates arming Leave campaigners and arbitrary deportations, claimed Jo Cox's husband was a fascist, uses racial and ethnic slurs while claiming they're not pejorative, pretends to be Labour (badly) while espousing far-right racist hate speech, praises Theresa May and the Tories, and displays a perverted and poisonous obsession with Scotland's First Minister & her predecessor.

It should run along now; tomorrow's Dreary Heil is short a green-inked rant for the letters page.

Probably replacing the regional lists with STV taking in to account the performance at a constituency level. Not entirely happy with the idea of a national rather than regional proportional element as then "Acts of God" might suppress turnouts. Having the make up of your parliament depend on whether the weather was good or bad doesn't seem like a good idea.

Having been of the generation which forced the NZ parliament against its will (yes, really) to change the voting system from FPTP to MMP including a pre-internet national conversation on voting systems (I kid you not) I have long been in favour of national lists.

The regional list system strangely introduced in Scotland was always about stopping the SNP getting a majority (except they forgot about the Greens).

In NZ a party which does not win any constituencies must get at least 5% of the vote to get anyone in on the List. Though in contrast to d'Hont getting one seat can catapult List people in from under 5%. We might want to think about not doing that, it has led to some strangeness in NZ.

But I see few good things about regional lists. With STV Margo could still have got in in the Lothians as an Independent constituency member.